Cuppy Power!

Some bloggers of note have been commenting on the intelligence of one S.E. Cupp. I have not gone to the Cupp... er... well in quite some time.

Personally, I don't think that S.E. Cupp is the dumbest pundit working, although she has produced some of the stupidest punditry to assault the airwaves and t00bz. Cupp is actually pretty canny, having crafted a pretty sophisticated media image. Cupp's M.O. largely consists of titillation, her "naughty librarian" image, much like that of Sarah Palin, appeals to a conservative male fan base... she's basically a pinup for pinheads. I guess you can't spell fanservice without "S.E."

On a deeper (though certainly still shallow) level, Cupp's schtick is trollery. Almost inevitably, a male reader will make a sexist comment on a post. In the linked "Pandagon" post, a commenter left this charming little nugget:


She is exactly the sort of person about whom it could reasonably be said that the smartest thing to ever come out of her mouth was probably someone's cock. And by "someone," I mean literally anyone capable of fogging a mirror. Wearing sexy librarian glasses may get a few tongues wagging among the aging Fox News demographic, but it obviously does nothing for her reasoning skills.


I, of course, referred the commenter to Dr Noisewater's post on the Hustler flap. Cupp sets a trap, and those who take the bait enable her to spin a "both sides are equally bad" narrative, while excoriating Women's Rights Groups, who are too busy fighting to preserve women's freedoms to scan porn mags and the internet for sexist depictions of S.E. Cupp, for not coming to her defense. Sometimes it's hard not to fall into the trap- her act is deliberately provocative. Hell, I myself have to shamefully confess that, if I delivered a pizza to her house and she asked me if I had her "large pepperoni", I'd be hoping for the bass to kick in.

After the big Hustler flap, it has to be noted that S.E. Cupp, who didn't thank Sandra Fluke for standing up for her, thanked Larry Flynt instead for the free publicity. If that's not a supreme act of trollery, I don't know what is. In the course of the controversy, Cupp made a false equivalence between "liberal" (yeah, right) Larry Flynt and Rush Limbaugh, she lambasted women's groups, and she claimed to have scored a public relations coup. She's awful, but she's certainly more clever than the typical right-wing bloviator.

Though she may have produced some of the dumbest punditry, Cupp is not the dumbest pundit. It's a subtle distinction, but one that I feel must be made. Cupp is a crafty performance artist, playing her multifarious roles, sex kitten, aggrieved victim, corporatist shill, libertarianesque hipster, with a facility that would make Lon Chaney, Jr blush under his monster makeup.

As a postscript, I have to confess that the real purpose of this post is to throw up some weapons-grade snark...

I believe that S.E. Cupp's public persona was crafted after watching post shark-jumping Scooby Doo. S.E. Cupp is pretty much Daphne, wearing Velma's glasses, after having had Scrappy Doo's hyperactive, abrasive brain transplanted into her body. Given her track record of wrecking cable shows she's cast in, there's another point of comparison between S.E. and Scrappy.

CUPPY POWER!!!

Cross posted at Rumproast.

The Highway's Jammed by Right Wing Zeroes on a Fat Chance Power Trip

I've written quite a bit about New Jersey governor Chris Christie, aka the Hudson Harkonnen, America's cafone, and Phony Soprano. The latest Chris Christie news is a rapidly ballooning scandal, the closure of lanes on the George Washington Bridge by Christie Administration Port Authority apointees which caused major traffic snarls, seemingly to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, who didn't endorse him in his gubernatorial race. Predictably, Christie is blaming an underling for this d-baggery. Christie is just the sort of vindictive creep who'd place the lives of ordinary people at risk (the lane closures have been implicated in the death of a woman due to a delay in the arrival of medical help) to "punish" an "enemy".

To tell the truth, Christie's handling of Port Authority matters has been awful from the beginning of his tenure as governor, when he put the kibosh on a Hudson River rail crossing that would have been funded by the federal government. Even when he's not motivated by spite, the guy is an utter disaster.

I wonder if, had Christie's incompetent-at-best and depraved-at-worst Port Authority hires been exposed in November, the jerk would have won the gubernatorial election. By making people's commutes longer and more tedious, his administration hit people "where they live". I don't believe that even the most rabid GOPer would countenance a policy which directly harmed him... not only "those people" were affected by these traffic snarls.

Got buyers' remorse, Jerseyites?


Cross posted at Rumproast.

Coping With Cold

Like much of the country, the NY metro area has been trapped in the grip of a polar vortex (I think it's kinda like a remorhaz. Working the graveyard shift last night was not fun at all, the mercury dipped to three degrees Fahrenheit (about sixteen below Celsius). High winds made it feel even colder (about minus fifteen Fahrenheit, minus twenty-six Celsius). Needless to say, I reduced my outdoor exposure, but the demands of the job entailed being outside for about twenty minutes on a few occasions. Again, it was not a fun night at all. The crazy thing is that the temperature dropped more than fifty degrees over the course of a mere twenty-four hours. I wasn't too uncomfortable, I made sure to bring plenty of layers of clothes, and I slathered myself nose to toes with plenty of Queen Helene Cocoa Butter Lotion before getting dressed. Just as Gertrude Ederle did before her English Channel swim, I greased myself before heading out.

Even after sunup, the temperature didn't break single digits. There weren't a lot of people on the roads at 8AM, and I wonder if a lot of people decided to take a day off, or were granted a weather-related work delay. I hit the supermarket on my way home from work and bought a pork shoulder to roast, mainly because I wanted to keep a slow oven going all day long. Needless to say, I haven't left the house since getting home. Tomorrow, the temperature is supposed to jump to a balmy twenty-five, and by Saturday, it'll be pushing sixty once more.

It's weird having half-a-year's worth of weather fluctuations in the space of a week.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

It's been a weird day. I worked the graveyard shift this morning and, even though it was fairly warm out, the ground didn't get the memo. The fine, misty rain froze as soon as it hit the pavement, resulting in really slippery sheets of black ice. I almost did several faceplants as I was walking through the parking lot at work. The temperature continually rose through the wee hours of the morning, until it was pushing 60F. The dangerous black ice situation resolved itself by 4AM.

When I finally got home this morning, it was about fifty degrees and a light rain was falling. I found my next door neighbor, who is retired and is living with her hundred year-old mother, juggling an umbrella and a snow shovel, and attempting to clear a mound of snow in front of her house in order to clear a parking spot for her sister, who often comes over to watch mom when my neighbor runs errands. I couldn't watch my neighbor try to pull off this juggling act, so I decided to lend a hand.

I spent about half an hour breaking up the large mounds of snow in front of our two houses, and scattering the resultant chunks throughout the gutter so that the combination of warmth and water could melt them. I don't know why this isn't done on a grander scale- in these parts, the mountains of dirty snow tend to linger until April, especially in large parking lots.

Currently, there is very little snow remaining from Friday's storm, which dumped almost a foot of fine powder on the ground. As tonight is supposed to be characterized by an extreme drop in temperature (we're talking a sixty degree drop over the course of twenty-four hours), that's a good thing.

Out of the Blue

I left work at 1PM today- after the graveyard shift, I had to work another site for half a shift. Staffing is an issue, my department is down to three people, so we have to stretch to cover everything. When I left the site, the sky was an incredible azure (it was still fairly cold, so insert an Azure Agony joke as you see fit), as the cliche would have it, there was not a cloud in the sky:

When I finally got home from work, I put on the radi-adi-o, and heard the breaking news that a small plane had made an emergency landing on the Major Deegan Expressway. The fact that there were no fatalities boggles the mind.

When I was a 'ute, I always used to joke about Major Deegan, the guy who lent his name to the expressway- this line of jocularity was kicked off by a classmate of my brother Sweetums who, before a jaunt to Yankee Stadium, claimed that "Me and the Deegan are like this (holding his index and middle fingers together to denote closeness)." Who the hell was Major Deegan, and why is there a major highway named after him? Is he a made-up character, like Cap'n Crunch, or a fake officer like Colonel Sanders? In due time, I actually did some research and found out that he was a major in the Army Corps of Engineers, an architect, and a local politician of note. Of course, this information is now at one's fingertips- a current-day wag would pose that "who is that Major Deegan guy?" question, and someone would say, "Google it, knucklehead!" before the wag could get the gag going.

Abominabald Snowman

It's currently seven degrees Fahrenheit (almost -14 Celsius) out, and strong winds are blowing the snow into drifts about a foot deep. It's not pleasant out, but it looks pretty- I particularly love the patterns in the iced-over surface of the body of water on site:

The cliche is that the site looks like a scene from a Currier and Ives lithograph... in fact, Currier and Ives printed a lithograph of the site I am working at, and a couple of another of our sites. Of course, it's impossible to dig up any 19th Century American artifacts without finding a nasty underbelly... so, Currier and Ives fans, prepare to be shocked and appalled. Yeah, nasty, aren't they? They are a far cry from the saccharine winter scenes and stirring depictions of historical events.

Sorry about that jarring interlude, but I felt I had to drag that unpleasantness into the light of day. Getting back to the body of the post, around 5AM, I took a picture of myself bundled up before heading out for a half-hour site inspection tour (though it was hard to see anything in the near whiteout conditions).

That snow ninja! I pretty much covered up from head to toe- layering a moisture-wicking thermal undershirt, a long-sleeved waffle-weave T-shirt, a sweatshirt, a button-down flannel, and a hoodie, topping it all off with a nylon windbreaker to keep an excessive amount of snow from soaking into my ensemble. Yeah, I was pretty much ready for anything Old Man Winter or, if you prefer, the Cailleach could throw at me. If the getup sounds a bit much, I have to note that the heat is set low during the night, high enough to keep the pipes from bursting, but not much hotter. Stuffing Ginger down my shirt was not an option, at least not a sound one.

Right now, the snow is still falling, but the fine powder that had already fallen is being whipped up by the wind, so it's hard to tell the provenance of any one flake. Today, I'm the only flake I can be sure of.

SNERMAHGERD!

Tonight is pretty brutal, weather-wise, here, in the the trailer park Greater Yonkers Metropolitan Area. As my inclination on nights like this is to stay put, rather than to travel, I switched shifts with tonight's "midnight man" to obviate the need for both of us to travel. It's not a fun night, but it's bearable, as long as one wears plenty of layers of clothes... and as long as (dare I tempt fate?) the power isn't affected by high winds. As a precaution, I collected a bunch of candle stubs in case of a power failure.

My typical line regarding work is that it's a cushy job, except when it's not, and tonight is clearly in the "not" column. I can't complain, I packed as if I were going on a campaign trip, and I have mah preshus kittehs to accompany me. It's going to be a tough night, but not a terrible one.

Post title explained... I missed out on the "Gersberms" phenomenon (for the record, when it comes to scary Young Adult fiction, I'm a big John Bellairs fan), but author R.L. Stine seems like a pretty good guy.